In light of Dr. George Tiller’s murder, it’s time for our president to step up to the plate and defend the abortion rights he (somewhat tepidly, of late) claims to support. For years, we’ve been hearing that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” a formulation popularized by Bill Clinton. No sensible person aware of the gruesome consequences of criminalizing abortion would disagree with that sentiment. But it’s past time for our leaders to move beyond these market-tested maxims. It’s unconscionable for smart, decent people who support women’s freedom and autonomy for themselves and their families—and I like to imagine that our president is in this category—to tap dance around this issue. Obama should hold a press conference at which he reads a brief statement expressing his profound grief at this brutal murder and denouncing it as an act of terrorism, extending his condolences to Dr. Tiller’s family, and stating in no uncertain terms that, whatever people’s differences of opinion with regard to abortion, the cold-blooded murder of abortion providers is wrong and will not be tolerated in a free, democratic society.
More than this sentiment, which is shared by all decent and rational people, I want Obama to say, clearly and for the record, that Americans remember what it was like when abortion was illegal, and we won’t go back to those dark days on his watch. I want him to remind everybody, in graphic detail, what it was like. I want him to tell anyone who’s listening that doctors like George Tiller and Barnett Slepian were heroes who fought and died to help women and their families. The more demented abortion protesters love to brandish pictures of “aborted fetuses” (as a former clinic escort, I’ve seen these up close and personal, and I can attest that they are not actual photographs, but crude hand-drawn renderings splashed with garish red paint). If gruesome pictures are what they understand best, we can communicate with them in their preferred language by bringing out some pictures of our own. Our pictures are real; there are more unaltered photographs and first-person accounts of desperate women who bled to death as the result of obtaining unsafe, illegal abortions than most people would ever care to see or hear. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that these women were fully developed human beings; even the most unhinged anti-abortion zealots would agree with that statement. Obama needs to tell us unequivocally that neither he himself, the people who work for him, nor anyone he’s considering for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court will ever send American women back to coat hangers and back alleys. I don’t know President Obama, but he seems to believe that his own daughters should have control over their bodies and destinies. It’s time for him to stop kowtowing to lunatics, and to so-called moderates whose every statement aids and abets lunatics, and start defending the freedom he cherishes for his own family. Dr. Tiller and his family deserve no less.
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Great post - you said everything better than I could, and I have just one more response to part of what you said:
"...If gruesome pictures are what they understand best, we can communicate with them in their preferred language by bringing out some pictures of our own. Our pictures are real; there are more unaltered photographs and first-person accounts of desperate women who bled to death as the result of obtaining unsafe, illegal abortions than most people would ever care to see or hear..."
Their gruesome pictures remind me that while abortion can look gruesome, a lot of other lifesaving procedures look gruesome too. What if pictures of our own included (only with the permission of each photographed patient, of course!) Caesarean sections, vaginal births, artery bypasses, liver transplants, appendectomies, brain tumor removals, knee replacement surgeries, etc.?
Agree with Mina, this is a great post. I would like to say this is my favorite sentence:
"Obama needs to tell us unequivocally that neither he himself, the people who work for him, nor anyone he’s considering for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court will ever send American women back to coat hangers and back alleys."
I have dreamed of this moment since he was nominated, then elected, then on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, then when he overturned the Global Gag Rule, and still after all these months... nothing.
It just still makes me very uneasy that there has been no simple but firm statement on abortion.